Name: Air France's New Female Boss Has a Flight Plan Cleared for Take Off
Uploaded: 2020-01-10
Duration: 5 min 44 s
Description: As the first female CEO at Air France, Anne Rigail says she needs to cut costs, lift profits, solve labor turmoil to get the airline flying high again.

[ MUSIC ] And when you took charge as a CEO, your predecessor said that he's confident that you'll succeed in transforming the airline. What's the single most important thing you're going to do to make that happen? So first goal is to fix the fundamental. The operational performance punctuality regularity, simplify the fleet to be more economical and environmentally efficient and we will have to tackle the efficiency of the organization. Less management lose more connecting with people on the ground To be able to simplify, to digitize all our processes, transversely, collectively with our staff. That's a lot to do. Let me just pick up on one of them. You talk about your fleet, and you are going about doing overhaul of hiring a lot of new planes, both from Airbus And Boeing, how critical is that to the restructuring? Well, it's totally critical because we've seen that new generation aircraft decrease cost tremendously for Airbus two to 2300. It's minus 10 % of unit costs per seat. Airbus 350 that will work we are coming now in the fleet. It is minus 25 % of fuel consumption. So it is good for the environment. It is good for the economics and it is good also for the customer experience because they come with the highest standards of Kevin's so you're not having any of the Boeing 737 Max, but What was your takeaway on the grounding of the 737 MAX and all the investigations and the hearings? What were the takeaway lessons and the lessons learned for the airline industry? Well, it's an old lesson is that safety comes with adapting the new technologies and the behavior and the training. It has been the case for many, many years. It's still the case and we are focusing on our safety everyday. It's a major concern in an airline and we will continue to do so. So you're focusing on safety. Is there anything that you're doing differently because of what happened in this tragic? Accident. So it's not doing six differently. But it reminded us of the top priority to link behavior and technology. A lot of what you want to do to improve at Air France has to do also what's going on in the business environment and the economy around you. So looking ahead to 2020. How is travel demand, how full are your planes, whether is for vacation travel or business? Well, we have the opportunity to be in the business that grow. We have emerging middle class in many many countries. So globally is a positive trend. But we also face some challenges. Challenges that are trade worse, that can impact our business demand, that can impact our cargo demand. We have a balanced network, maybe the most balanced network in all the major airlines. So we can relocate the traffic, our network and planning from less dynamic areas to more dynamic areas. As you probably know, there are many economists who are talking about a severe global slowdown in the economy and in some cases, maybe a recession. From your perspective, is that what you're seeing? It's not what we're seeing. I think that companies are cautious. They are cautious on the business travel costs. We can feel it. But at the moment, traffic is very dynamic. So we can't feel this kind of very negative predictions. So you're not making any special preparations for a slowdown. No we're growing. We're growing from 2 to 3 person per year. We have new tools, new aircraft that are very efficient. And we see the overall demand, either in leisure or business being very dynamic dynamic on the medium term. So here we are at the Fortune Global Forum conference in Paris. And the theme is reinventing business for the next decade as you look at About the future for Air France. What do you want people to say that it's become ten years from now? Our dream would have to be to remove all the hassles that customers still have to face in their journey in the airport. So thanks to facial recognition they could go with a passport in their pockets. Through checking, through security checks, through boarding, I think that tech is helping us a lot. Even to have more efficient processes, for example, in maintenance, predictive maintenance allow us to foresee the biggest failures. So we can say that in 10 years time It will have some lot to reduce any disruptions. But also in 10 years time, I think we must imagine a greener airline industry, and we are committed to have more and more action plans in order to be much more efficient in terms of environmental impact. Internal stamps. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Air France's New Female Boss Has a Flight Plan Cleared for Take Off

Leadership

Rigail has a bold plan in place for the airline.

Air France's Anne Rigail on Future of Company

As the first female CEO at Air France, Anne Rigail says she needs to cut costs, lift profits, solve labor turmoil to get the airline flying high again.